XI. EXTRACTS FROM A FATHER’S DIARY.

There has just come into my hands a curious document. It is a sort of diary kept by a father in which he chronicles certain of the early doings and sayings of his boy. It makes no pretence to being a regular and methodical register of progress, such as Mr. F. Galton has shown us how to carry out. It may be said by way of extenuation that the diary sets out in the year 1880, that is to say, two years before Professor Preyer published his model record of an infant’s progress. En revanche, it is manifestly the work of a psychologist given to speculation, and this of a somewhat bold type. In the present paper I propose to cull from this diary what seem to me some of the choicer observations and comments on these. If these do not always come up to the requirements of a rigidly scientific standard in respect of completeness, precision, and grave impartiality, they may none the less prove suggestive of serious scientific thought, while any extravagances of fancy and any levity of manner may well be set down to the play of a humorous sentiment, which betrays the father beneath the observer.

I may begin my sketch of the early history of this boy by remarking that he appears to have been a normal and satisfactory specimen of his class,—healthy, good-natured, and given to that infantile way of relieving the pressure of his animal spirits which is, I believe, known as crowing. Not believing in the classifications of temperament adopted by the physiologists of a past age, the father forbears from describing his child’s. For my lady readers I may add that he seems, at least by his father’s account, to have been a good-sized, chubby little fellow, fair and rosy in tint, with bright blue eyes, and a 400limited crop of golden hair of an exceptionally rich, I don’t know how many carat gold, hue. I shall speak of him under his initial, C.

First Year.

The early pages of the record do not, one must confess, yield any very striking observations. This is, no doubt, due to the circumstance that the observer, not being a naturalist, was not specially interested in the dim mindless life of the first weeks. For the first few days Master C. appears to have been content to vegetate like other babies of a similar age. Although a bonny boy, he began life in the usual way—with a good cry; though we now know, on scientific authority, that this, being a purely reflex act, has not the deep significance which certain pessimistic philosophers have attributed to it. Science would probably explain in a similar way a number of odd facial movements which this baby went through on the second day of his earthly career, and which, the father characteristically remarks, were highly suggestive of a cynical contempt for his new surroundings.

Yet, though content in this early stage to do little but perform the vegetal functions of life, the infant comes endowed with a nervous system and organs of sense, and these are very soon brought into active play. According to this record, the sense of touch is the first to manifest itself.^[286] Even when only two hours old, at a period of life when there is certainly no sound for the ear and possibly no light for the eye, C. immediately clasped the parental finger which was brought into the hollow of its tiny hand. The functional activity of touch was observed still more plainly on the second day, when the child was seen to carry out awkwardly enough what looked like exploring movements of the hands over his mouth and face. This early development in the child of the tactual sense agrees, says the biographer, with what Aristotle long since taught respecting the fundamental character of this sense, an idea to 401which the modern doctrine of evolution has given a new significance.

A distinct step is taken during the first four days towards acquiring knowledge of things through a progressive use of the eyes and hands. C.’s father noticed on the second day that a good deal of ocular movement was forthcoming. Much of this was quite irregular, each eye following its own path. Sometimes, however, the eyes moved harmoniously or symmetrically now to this side, now to that, and now and again seemed to converge and fix themselves on some near object in front of them. Sufficiently loud sounds increased these ocular movements.

On the third day the father, when chuckling and calling to the child at a short distance, fondly supposed that his offspring showed appreciation of these attentions by regarding him with a sweet expression and something like the play of a smile about the lips and eyelids. But it is possible that this apparent amiability was nothing but a purely animal satisfaction after a good meal. As to seeing his father’s face at that early age, there is room for serious doubt. Preyer found that long before the close of the first day his child wore a different expression when his face, turned towards the window, was suddenly deprived of light by the intervention of the professor’s hand. If the child is thus sensible to the pleasure of light it is, of course, conceivable that C.’s eyes, happening in their aimless wanderings to be brought together opposite the bright patch of the father’s face, might maintain that attitude under the stimulus of the pleasure. The father argues in favour of this view by quoting the fact that C.’s sister was observed on the fourth day to have her eyes arrested by a light or the father’s face if brought pretty near the child; yet such blank staring at mere brightness is, of course, a long way off from distinct vision of an object.

On the fourth day, continues the sanguine father, the child showed a distinct advance in the use of the hands. Having clasped his sire’s finger he now moved it in what looked like an abortive attempt to carry it to his mouth. There follow some remarks on the impulse of infants to carry objects to their mouths, in which again there seems an approach to frivolity in the conjecture that the human animal previous to 402education is all-devouring. It is to be noted, however, that these early movements are probably quite accidental. As we shall see, it is some weeks before the child learns to carry objects to his mouth. As to the connexion between this movement and infantile greed our observer is not so poor a psychologist as not to see that it may be due to the circumstance that the lips and the tip of the tongue form one of the most delicate parts of the tactual organ. It is not improbable that in the evolution of man before the tactual sensibility of the hand was developed these parts were chiefly employed as a tactual apparatus in distinguishing and rejecting what is hard, gritty and so forth in food. However this be, it is probable that, as Stanley Hall has suggested, an infant may get a kind of “æsthetic” pleasure by bringing objects into contact with the lips and the gums.

At this period, the diary remarks, the child was very cross for some weeks and not a good subject for observation. This new difficulty, added to that of overcoming natural scruples in his guardians, appears to have baffled the observer for a time, for the next observations recorded take up the thread of the child’s history at the sixth week.

About this date, the father notes, the power of directing the eyes had greatly improved. The child could now converge his eyes comfortably and without going through a number of unpleasant squinting-like failures on a near object. The range of sight had greatly increased, so that the boy’s universe, instead of consisting merely of a tiny circle of near objects, as his mother’s face held close to him, began to embrace distant objects, as the clock, the window, and so forth. He was observed, too, to carry out more precise movements of the head and eyes in correspondence with the direction of sounds. This ability to look towards the direction of a sound is an important attainment as implying that the infant mind has now come to learn that things may exist when not actually seen.

This new command of the visual apparatus led to a marked increase in observation. The boy may indeed be said to have begun about this date something like a serious scrutiny of objects. Like other children he was greatly attracted by 403brightly coloured objects. When just seven weeks old he acquired a fondness for a cheap showy card with crudely brilliant colouring and gilded border. When carried to the place where it hung, above the glass over the fire-place, he would look up to it and greet his first-love in the world of art with a pretty smile. By the ninth or tenth week, the father adds, he began to notice the pattern of the wall-paper and the like.

In these growing intervals of observation between the discharge of the vegetal functions of feeding and sleeping, C. was observed to examine not only any foreign object, such as his mamma’s dress, which happened to be within sight, but also the visible parts of his own organism. In the ninth week of his existence he was first surprised in the act of surveying his own hands. Why he should at this particular moment have woke up to the existence of objects which had all along lain within easy reach of the eye, is a question which has evidently greatly exercised the father’s ingenuity. He hints, but plainly in a half-hearted, sceptical way, at a possible dim recognition by the little contemplator of the fact that these objects belong to himself, forming, indeed, the outlying portion of the Ego. He also asks (and here he seems to grow positively frivolous) whether the child is taking after the somewhat extravagant ways of his mother and beginning to dote on the exquisite modelling of his tiny members.

Psychologists are now agreed that our knowledge of the properties of material objects is largely obtained by what they call active touch, that is, by moving the hands over objects and exploring the space around them. This is borne out by the observations made on C. at this period of his existence. While viewing things about him he actively manipulated them. The organs of sight and touch worked indeed in the closest connexion. Thus our little visitor was no mere passive spectator of his new habitat; he actively took possession of his surroundings: like the Roman general, he at once saw and conquered. From the eighth to the tenth week his manual performances greatly improved in quality. He was rapidly learning to carry the organ of touch to the point of which his 404eye told him. An account of his progress in reaching objects may however be postponed till we come to speak of the development of his active powers.

The growing habit of looking at, reaching out to, and manually investigating objects, soon leads to the accumulation of a store of materials for the construction of those complex mental products which we call perceptions. And often-repeated perceptions, when they become more clearly distinguished, supply the basis of definite acts of recognition. The first object that is clearly recognised through a special act of attention is, of course, the face of the mother. In the case of C., the father’s face was apparently recognised about the eighth week—at least, the youngster first greeted his parent with a smile about this time—an event, I need hardly say, which is recorded in very large and easily legible handwriting. The occurrence gives rise to a number of odd reflexions in the parental mind. The observer’s belief in the necessary co-operation of sight and touch in the early knowledge of material objects leads him to remark that C.’s manual experience of his face, and more particularly of the bearded chin, has been extensive—an experience which, he adds, has left its recollection in his own mind, too, in the shape of a certain soreness. He then goes on to consider the meaning of the smile. “I cannot,” he writes, “be of any interest to him as a psychological student of his ways. No, it must be in the light of a bearded plaything that he regards my face.” Further observation bears out this argument by going to show that the recognition was not individual but specific: that it was simply a recognition of one of a class of bearded people; for when a perfect stranger also endowed with the entertaining appendage presented himself, C. wounded his father’s heart by smiling at him in exactly the same way. Here the diary goes off into some abstruse speculations about the first mental images being what Mr. Galton calls generic images—speculations into which we need not follow the writer. As we shall see, the father takes up the subject of childish generalisation more fully later on. The power of recognising objects appeared to undergo rapid development towards the end of the fourth month. The father remarks that the child would about 405this time recognise him in a somewhat dark room at a distance of three or four yards.^[287]

The germ of true imagination, of the formation of what Höffding calls a free or detached image of something not seen at the moment, appeared about the same time. The moment when the baby’s mind first passes on from the sight of his bottle to a foregrasping or imagination of the blisses of prehension and deglutition—a moment which appears to have been reached by C. in his tenth week—marks an epoch in his existence. He not only perceives what is actually present to his senses, he pictures or represents what is absent. This is the moment at which, to quote from the parent’s somewhat high-flown observations on this event, “mind rises above the limitations of the actual, and begins to shape for itself an ideal world of possibilities”.

This rise of the ideal to take the place of the real appeared in other ways too. Thus when just eighteen weeks old the child had been lying on his nurse’s lap and gazing on some pictures on the wall of which he was getting fond. The nurse happening to turn round suddenly put an end to his happiness. Still the child was not to be done, but immediately began twisting his head back in order to bring the pictures once more into his field of view. Here we have an illustration of a mental image appearing immediately after a perception, a rude form of what psychologists are now getting to call a primary memory-image.

The expression of the gourmet’s delight at the sight of the bottle (tenth week) involves a simple process of association. Between the ages of five and six months the child’s progress in building up associations was very marked. Thus he would turn from a reflexion of the fire on the glass of a picture to the fire itself, and a little later would look towards a particular picture, Cherry Ripe, when the name was uttered. Further, not only had he now learnt to connect the sight of the bottle with the joys of a repast, but on seeing the basin in which his 406food is prepared he would glance towards the cupboard where the bottle is kept.

The diary contains but few observations on the growth of the power of understanding things and reasoning about them during the first year. One of the most interesting of these relates to the understanding of reflexions, shadows, etc. We know that these things played a considerable part in the development of the first racial ideas of the supernatural, and we might expect to see them producing an impression on the child’s mind. C. when he first began to notice reflexions of the fire and other objects in a mirror showed considerable marks of surprise. What quaint fancies he may have had respecting this odd doubling of things we cannot of course say. What is certain is that he distinctly connected the reflexion with the original, as is shown by the fact already mentioned, his turning from the first to the second. By the end of the sixth month the marks of surprise had visibly lessened, so that the child was apparently getting used to the miracle, even though he could not as yet be said to understand it. It is worth notice that though the experiment of showing him his own reflexion was repeated again and again he remained apparently quite indifferent to the image. Perhaps, suggests the father, he did not as yet know himself as visible object sufficiently to recognise nature’s portrait of him in the glass.

The above may perhaps serve as a sample of the observations made on the intellectual development of this privileged child during the first year of his earthly existence. I will now pass on to quote a remark or two on his emotional development. I may add that the record of this phase of the boy’s early mental life is certainly the most curious part of the document, containing many odd speculations on the course of primitive human history.

The earliest manifestations of the life of feeling are the elemental forms of pain and pleasure, crying and incipient laughing in the form of the smile.^[288] In C.’s case, as in others, crying of the genuine miserable kind preceded smiling by a 407considerable interval. The child, remarks our observer, seems to need to learn to smile, whereas his crying apparatus is in good working order from the first.

The growth of the smile is a curious chapter in child-psychology, and has been carefully worked out by Preyer. The observations on C. under this head are incomplete. The father thought he detected an attempt at a smile on the third day, when the child was lying replete with food, in answer to certain chuckling sounds with which he sought to amuse him. The movements constituting this quasi-smile are said to have been the following: a drawing in of the under lip; a drawing inwards and backwards of the corners of the mouth: increase of oblique line from the corner of the mouth upwards; and a furrowing or ridging of the eyelids. It is probable, however, that this was not a true smile, i.e., an expression of pleasure. He remarks, moreover, that in the case of the child’s sister the first approach to a smile was not observed before the tenth day, this, too, by-the-bye, in that state of blissful complaisance which follows a good meal. It may be added that in the case of the brother, too, the smile seems to have grown noticeably bright and significant about the same time (eighth to tenth week). At this stage the boy expressed his pleasure at seeing his father’s face not only by a “bright” smile, but by certain cooing sounds. At the same date a playful touch on the child’s cheek was sufficient to provoke a smile.^[289]

Very early in the infant’s course the germs of some of our most characteristic human feelings begin to appear. One of the earliest is anger, which though common to man and many of the higher animals, takes on a peculiar form in his case. Angry revolt against the order of things showed itself early in C.’s case as in that of his sister, the occasion being in each instance a momentary difficulty in seizing the means of appeasing appetite. It is of course difficult to say at what moment the mere vexation of disappointment passes into true wrath, but in this boy’s case the father is compelled 408to admit that the ugly emotion displayed itself distinctly by the third week.

To detect the first clear signs of a humane feeling, of kindliness and sympathy, is still more difficult. Reference has already been made to the signs of pleasure, the smile and the cooing sounds, which C. manifested at the sight of his father’s face. About the same time, viz., the ninth and tenth weeks, he began to show himself particularly responsive to soothing sounds. The impulse to imitate soft low sounds was of great service in checking his misery. When utterly broken by grief he would often pull himself together if appealed to by the right soothing sound and join in a short plaintive duet. Such responses like the early imitative smile may, it is true, be nothing but a mechanical imitation, destitute of any emotive significance. It is probable, however, that the first crude form of fellow-feeling, of the impulse to accept and to give sympathy in joy and grief, takes its rise in such simple imitative movements. The first advance to signs of a truer fellow-feeling was made when the child was six and a half months old. His father pretended to cry. Thereupon C. bent his head down so that his chin touched his breast and began to paw his father’s face, very much after the manner of a dog in a fit of tenderness. Oddly enough, adds the chronicler, there was no trace of sadness in the child’s face. The experiment was repeated and always with a like result. A smile on the termination of the crying completed the curious little play. Who would venture to interpret that falling of the head and that caressing movement of the hand? The father saw here something of a divine tenderness; and I am not disposed to question his interpretation.

Emotion soon begins to manifest itself, too, in connexion with the child’s peerings into his new world. As the little brain grows stronger and the organs of sense come under better management, the child spends more time in examining things, and this examination is accompanied by a profound wonder. C. would completely lose himself in marvelling at some new mystery, as the face of a clock, to which he appeared to talk as to something alive, or the play of the sunlight on the wall of his room; and the closeness of his attention was 409indicated by the occurrence of a huge sigh when the strain was over.

The directions of this early childish attention are, as in the example of the clock and the sunlight, towards what has some attraction of brightness, or other stimulating quality. The fascination of bright colour for C. has already been referred to. Sounds, too, very soon began to capture his attention and hold it spellbound. Thus it is recorded that in the tenth week the sound produced by striking a wine-glass excited an agreeable wonder. The sound of the piano, by-the-bye, made him cry the first time he heard it, presumably because it was strange and disconcertingly voluminous. But he soon got to like it, and his mother remarked that when his father played the child seemed to grow heavier in her lap, as if all his muscles were relaxed in a delicious self-abandonment.^[290]

Certain things became favourite objects of this quasi-æsthetic contemplation. When six weeks old the child got into the way of taking special note of one or two rather showy coloured pictures on the wall. In these it seemed to be partly the brightness of colouring in the picture or the frame, partly the reflexions of objects in the glass covering, which attracted him. Other things which appeared to give him repeated and endless enjoyment of a quiet sort were the play of sunlight and of shadow on the walls of his room, the reflexion of the shooting fire-flame sent back by the window-pane or the glass covering of a picture, the swaying of trees, and the like. He soon got to know the locality of some of his favourite works of art, and to look out expectantly, when taken into the right room, for his daily show.

Yet the new does not always awaken this pleasurable admiration. The child’s organism soon begins to adapt itself to what is customary, and sudden departures from the usual order of things come as a shock, jar the nerves, and produce the first crude form of fear. C.’s sensitiveness to the disturbing effect of new and loud sounds has been referred to in speaking of the first impression of the piano. A strong wind making uproar in the trees quite upset him when he was about 410five months old, though he soon got over his dislike and would laugh at the wind even when it blew cold. In like manner he appeared to be much put out by the voices of strangers, especially when these were loud. A similar effect of shock showed itself when something in the familiar scene was suddenly transmuted. For example, when just twelve weeks old, he was quite upset by his mother donning a red jacket in place of the usual flower-spotted dress. He was just proceeding to take his breakfast when he noticed the change, at the discovery of which all thoughts of feasting deserted him, his lips quivered, and he only became reassured of his whereabouts after taking a good look at his mother’s face.

This clinging to the familiar and alarm at a sudden intrusion of the new into his little world showed themselves in a curious way in his attitude towards strangers. When ten weeks old he would still greet new faces with a gracious smile. But this amiable disposition soon underwent a change. When he began to discriminate people one from another and to single out particular faces, those of the mother, father, sister, etc., as familiar, he took up what looked like a less hospitable attitude towards strangers. By the fifteenth week he no longer greeted their advent with his welcoming smile. A month later the diary chronicles a new development of timidity. He now turned away from a stranger with all the signs of shrinking.^[291]

That this repugnance to the new depends on a kind of shock-like effect on the nervous system seems to be borne out by the fact that the same object would produce now joyous admiration, now something indistinguishable from fear, according to the boy’s varying condition of health and spirits.

Changes of sentiment analogous to those which marked his behaviour towards strangers occurred in his treatment of inanimate objects. For instance, a not very alarming-looking doll belonging to his sister, after having been a pleasant object of regard, suddenly acquired for him, when he was nearly five months old, a repulsive aspect. Instead of talking to it and making a sort of amiable deity of it as heretofore, he now shrieked when it was brought near. There seems to have been 411nothing in his individual experience which could account for this sudden accession of fear.

These observations led C.’s father to some characteristic speculations as to the inheritance of certain feelings. Thus he hints that the eerie sort of interest taken by his child in the reflexions of things in the glass may be a survival of the primitive feeling of awe for the ghosts of things which certain anthropologists tell us was first developed in connexion with the phenomena of reflected images and shadows. He goes on to ask whether the fear called forth by the doll and the face of strangers at a certain stage of the child’s development is not clearly due to an instinct now fixed in the race by the countless experiences of peril in its early, pre-social, and Ishmaelitic condition. But here, too, perhaps, his speculations appear, in the light of what has been said above, a little wild.

Among other feelings displayed by the child was that of amusement at what is grotesque and comical. When between four and five months old he was accustomed to watch the antics of his sister, an elfish being given to flying about the room, screaming, and other disorderly proceedings, with all the signs of a sense of the comicality of the spectacle. So far as the father could judge, this sister served as a kind of jester to the baby monarch. He would take just that distant, good-natured interest in her foolings that Shakespeare’s sovereigns took in the eccentric unpredictable ways of their jesters. The sense of the droll became still more distinctly marked at six months. About this date the child delighted in pulling his sister’s hair, and her shrieks would send him into a fit of laughter. Among other provocatives of laughter at this time were sudden movements of one’s head, a rapid succession of sharp staccato sounds from one’s vocal organ (when these were not disconcerting by their violence), and of course sudden reappearances of one’s head after hiding in the game of bo-peep.^[292]

It is hardly necessary to follow the diary into its record 412of the first stirrings of what psychologists used to call the Will (with capital W of course). If a baby in the first months can be said to have a will in any sense it must be that unconscious metaphysical “will to live” about which we have recently heard so much. On the other hand it is certainly true that the child manifests in the first weeks certain active impulses, the working out of which leads in about four months to the acquisition of the power of carrying out movements for a purpose. Reference has already been made to this progress in motor activity when speaking of the senses. It may suffice to add one or two further observations.

The father remarks that about the end of the ninth week there was a vigorous use of the muscles of the arms and hands in aimless movement. This superabundance of muscular activity is important, as giving children the chance of finding out the results of their movements. C. was just ten and a half weeks old when he first showed himself capable lying on his back of turning his head to the side, and even of half turning his body also, in order to have a good view of his father moving away to a distant part of the room.

About the same date, too, purposive movements began to be clearly differentiated from expressive movements; such, for example, as the quick energetic movement of the limbs when excited by pleasure. For instance, on the seventy-second day the father was surprised and delighted to see the boy add to the usual signs of joy at his approach the movement of leaning forward and holding out the arms as if to try to get near. Was this, he asks, the sudden emergence of an unlearnt instinct, or was it an imitation in baby fashion of his elders’ behaviour when they took possession of him?

The gradual growth of a voluntary movement into a perfect artistic action nicely adjusted to some desired end was strikingly illustrated in the boy’s mastery of the grasping movement, the movement of stretching out the hand to seize an object seen. On the seventy-sixth day, the father writes, he had carefully watched to see whether the child could voluntarily direct his hand to an object. He had tried him by holding before him attractive objects, as a bit of coloured rag 413or his hand, which he would regard very attentively. For the last week or ten days he had been very observant of objects, including his own hands.

Among the objects that attracted him was his mamma’s dress, which had a dark ground with a small white flower pattern. On this memorable day his hand accidentally came in contact with one of the folds of her dress lying over the breast. Immediately, it seemed to strike him for the first time that he could reach an object, and for a dozen times or more he repeated the movement of stretching out his hand, clutching the fold and giving it a good pull, very much to his own satisfaction.

A hasty reasoner might easily suppose that the child had now learnt to reach out to an object when only seen. But the sequel showed that this was not the case. Four weeks later the diary observes that the child as yet made no attempt to grasp an object offered to him (although there were manifest attempts to uncover the mother’s breast). The clutching at the dress was thus a blind movement due to the stimulus of pleasurable elation. Yet it was doubtless a step in the process of learning to grasp.

The next advance registered occurred when the boy was a little over four months old. He would now bring his two hands together just above the level of his eyes and then gaze on them attentively, striking out one arm straight in front of him, and upwards almost vertically, as if he were trying some new gymnastic exercises, while he accompanied each movement with his eye, and showed the deepest interest in what he was doing. By such exercises, we may suppose, he was exploring space with hand and eye conjointly and noting the correspondences between looking in a given direction and bringing his hand into the line of sight.

The next noticeable advance occurred at the end of the nineteenth week. The boy’s father held a biscuit (the value of which was already known) just below his face and well within his reach. There was a very earnest look and then a series of rapid jerky movements of the hands. These were uncertain at first, but on repetition of the experiment soon grew more precise. At first the biscuit was dropped (the child 414had not yet learnt to handle things). But after repeated trials he managed to hold on to the treasure and bear it triumphantly to his mouth. The discovery of the new delight of thus feeding himself led to more violent efforts to seize the biscuit when presented again. Indeed, the youngster’s impatience led him to reach forward with the upper part of his body so as to seize the biscuit with his mouth. It may be added here as throwing light on the carrying of the biscuit to the mouth that the child had before this acquired considerable facility in raising his hand to his mouth and to the region of his head generally. Thus he had been noticed to scratch his head with a comical look of sage reflexion when he was fifteen weeks old.

The consummation of the act of seizing an object involving a perception of distance was observed when he was just six months old. The father writes: “I held an object in front of him two or three inches beyond his reach. The astute little fellow made no movement. I then gradually brought it closer, and when it came within his reach he held out his hand and grasped it. I repeated the experiment with slight variations, and satisfied myself that he could now distinguish with some degree of precision the near and the far, the attainable and the unattainable, that his eyes could now inform him by what Bishop Berkeley called visual language of the exact limit, the ‘Ultima Thule’ of his tangible world.” It is natural, no doubt, that the father should go off into another high flight here. But being a psychologist he might have moderated his parental elation by reflecting that his wonderful boy had after all taken six months to learn what a chick seems to know as soon as it leaves the shell. It is doubtful, indeed, whether Master C.’s hand could as yet aim with the precision of the beak of the newly hatched chick. If he had only chanced on a later decade he might have known that five months is the time given by a recent authority (Raehlmann) as the period commonly taken in learning the grasping movements, and so had his pride in his boy’s achievement wholesomely tempered.^[293]

415These early movements are acquired under the stimulus of certain impulses which constitute the instinctive basis of volition. Thus it is obvious that the movement of carrying to the mouth as also that of reaching and grasping was inspired by the nutritive or feeding instinct, that deep-seated impulse which is common to man and the whole animal kingdom, and is the secret spring of so much of his proud achievement. The impulse to seize and appropriate may perhaps be regarded as an instinct which has become detached from its parental stock, the nutritive impulse. Our observer remarks, with a touch of cynicism, that the predominance of the grasping propensities of the race was illustrated by the fact that his boy only manifested the impulse to relinquish his hold on an object some time after he had displayed in its perfection the impulse to seize or grasp an object. Thus it was some months later that he was first observed deliberately to cast aside, as if tired of it, a thing with which he had been playing.

One of the deepest and most far-reaching instincts is to get rid of pain and to prolong pleasure. In C.’s case the working of the first was illustrated in a large number of movements, such as twisting the body round, scratching the head, and so forth. An illustration of the impulse to renew an agreeable effect occurred in the early part of the eighth month. The child was sitting on his mother’s lap close to the table playing with a spoon. He accidentally dropped it and was impressed with the effect of sound. He immediately repeated the action, now, no doubt, with the purpose of gaining the agreeable shock for his ear. After this when the spoon was put into his hand he deliberately dropped it. Not only so, like a true artist, he went on improving on the first effect, raising the spoon higher and higher so as to get more sound, and at length using force in dashing or banging it down.

Children, as everybody knows, are wont to render their elders that highest form of flattery, imitation. Our chronicle is unfortunately rather meagre in observations on the first imitative movements. There is no evidence that the writer went to work in Preyer’s careful way to test this capability. He thinks he saw distinct traces of imitation (of 416the pointing movement) at the end of the fifteenth week, though he admits that a deliberate attempt to copy a movement was only placed beyond doubt some time later.

There is, I regret to say, a terrible gap in the chronicle between the ninth and the sixteenth month. This is particularly unfortunate because this is just the period when the child is making a beginning at some of the most difficult of accomplishments, e.g., mastering the speech of his ancestors. To make up for this loss, the record becomes fuller and decidedly more interesting as we enter upon the second year. To this next stage of the history we may now pass.

Second Year.

The observations from the date of the resumption of the diary, at the age of sixteen months, begin to have more of human interest about them. It is not till this year has advanced that the child makes headway in handling the knotty intricacies of an elaborate language like ours, and it is through the medium of this mastered speech that he is best able to disclose himself to the observer. The observations on C.’s progress during the second year relate largely to language and intelligence as expressing itself in language. We may, accordingly, begin this section by giving a brief sketch of the child’s linguistic progress.^[294]

During the first six months nothing was observable in the way of vocal sounds but the ordinary baby-singing utterances of the ‘la-la’ category. In this tentative vocalisation vowel sounds, of course, preponderated. There was quite a gamut of quaint vowel sounds, ranging from the broad a to the cockney ow, that is, a-oo. These sounds were purely emotional signs. Thus a prolonged ā sound indicated surprise with a dash of displeasure when the child suddenly encountered an obstacle to his movements, as on catching his dress or striking his head gently. Again, a kind of ō or oo sound, formed by sucking in the breath, appeared to indicate that the small person was pleased with some new object of contemplation, as a freshly discovered picture.

417A sudden enlargement of the range of articulatory excursion was noticeable on the completion of the twenty-seventh week, when C. astonished his parents by breaking out into a series of ‘da-da’s’ and ‘ba-ba’s’ or ‘pa-pa’s’. These reduplications were quite in keeping with his earlier sounds, e.g., a-oo, a-oo. He soon followed up this brilliant success by other experiments, as in the production of the sounds ou-a and ditta, also ung and ang.^[295]

Coming now to the commencement of the true linguistic period, that is to say, when C. had attained the age of sixteen months, we find him by no means precocious in the matter of speech. He reproduced very few of the many names the meaning of which he perfectly understood. As to other verbal signs he seems to have acted on the principle of biological economy, saving himself the articulatory effort. Thus although he used sounds for expressing assent, viz., “ey,” with falling inflection, he contented himself in the case of negation with the old declining or refusing gesture, viz., shaking the head. The movement of nodding seems to have been first used as an affirmative sign at the age of seventeen months when he was asked whether his food was hot.^[296]

C. illustrated the common childish impulse to mimic natural sounds. Thus when sixteen months old he spontaneously imitated in a rough fashion the puffing sound produced by his father when indulging in the solace of tobacco; and he uttered a similar explosive sound when hearing the wind. Yet this 418child does not seem to have been a particularly good illustration of the onomatopoetic impulse.

While the imitative impulse thus aids in the growth of an independent baby vocabulary, it contributes, as we have seen, to the adoption of the language of the community. At first, however, the little learner will not repeat a sound merely in response to another’s lead. Many a mother is doubtless able to recall the chagrin which she experienced when on trying to trot out her baby’s linguistic powers by giving the lead, e.g., “Say ta-ta to the lady!” the little autocrat obdurately refused to comply with the parental injunction. It is only when what the child himself considers to be the appropriate circumstances recur, and, what is more, when the corresponding feeling is excited in his breast, that he utters the sound. Thus C.’s father observes that though the child will not say “ta-ta” when told to do so, he will say it readily enough when he sees him, hat in hand, moving towards the door. In like manner the father remarks: “He will say, ‘Ta’ (‘thank you’), on receiving something, yet not do so in mere response to me when I say it”. Herein, it would seem, the vocal imitation of children is less mechanical and more intelligent than that of animals, as the parrot.

It was not until he was well on in his second year that C. condescended to let his young speech-organ be played on by another’s will. By this time, it may be conjectured, associations between sounds and vocal actions had become firm enough to allow of such imitation without a consciousness of exertion or strain. Having no special reason to refuse he very sensibly fell in with others’ suggestions. It is not at all improbable, too, that at this stage of development the little vocalist found a pleasure in trying his instrument and producing new effects.

Of course these first tentatives in verbal imitation were far from perfect. At first there was hardly more than a reproduction of the rhythm and the rise and fall of voice, as in rendering ‘All gone,’ the sign of disappearance, by a, a, with rise and fall of voice. Like other little people, C. displayed a lordly disposition to save himself trouble and to expect infinite pains from others in the way of comprehension. He was in 419the habit of reducing difficult words to fragments, the comprehension of which by the most loyal of attendants was a matter of considerable difficulty. In thus chopping off splinters of words he showed the greatest caprice. In many cases he selected the initial sounds, e.g., “bŏ” for ball, “nō” for nose, “pē” for please. In other cases he preferred the ending, e.g., “ĕk” for cake, “bĕ” for Elizabeth. It looked as if certain sounds and combinations, e.g., l, s, fl, sh, etc., lay altogether beyond his gamut. And others seemed to be specially difficult, and so were avoided as much as possible.^[297]

While C.’s parents could not help resenting at times an economising of speech-power which imposed so heavy a burden on themselves, they were often amused at the way in which the astute little fellow managed after softening down all the asperities of a name to retain a certain rough semblance of the original. Thus, for instance, sugar became “ooga,” biscuit “bĭk,” bread and butter “bup,” fish “gish” (with soft g), and bacon-fat, that is bread dipped in the same, “ak”. In some cases it might have puzzled his father to say whether the sound was a reproduction or an independent creation. This remark applies with particular force to the name he gave himself. His real name as commonly used was, I may say, Clifford. Instead of this he employed as the name for himself “Ingi” or “Ningi” (with hard g). He stuck to his own invention in spite of many efforts to lead him to adopt the name chosen for him by his parents. And perhaps the sovereignty of the baby was never more clearly illustrated than in the fact that in time he constrained his parents and his sister to adopt his self-chosen prænomen. Possibly his real name was to his ear a hopelessly difficult mass of sound, and “Ningi” seemed to him a fair equivalent within the limits of practicable linguistics for so uncouth a combination.^[298] These changes are 420interesting as illustrating how the child attends to the general form of the word-sound rather than to its constituent elements.^[299] The same thing is seen in the modified form of “Ningi,” which he adopted at the beginning of the third year, viz., “Kikkie,” where, too, the special impressiveness of the initial sound is illustrated.

It is now time to pass to the most important phase of baby-speech from a scientific point of view, namely, the first use of sounds as general signs, or as registering the results of a generalising process, as when the child begins to speak of man or boy.

It must be confessed that our diary does not give us much that is startling in the way of original generalisation. So far as we can judge, C. was a steady-going baby, not given to wanton caprices. Yet though not a genius he had his moments of invention. One of the earliest illustrations of a free working of the generalising impulse was the extension of the sound “ŏt” (hot). At first he employed this sign in the conventional manner to indicate that his milk or other viand was disagreeably warm. When, however, he was seventeen and a half months old he struck out an original extension of meaning. He happened to have placed before him cold milk. On tasting this he at once exclaimed, “Ot!” It looks as though the sound now meant something unpleasant to taste, though, as we shall see presently, the boy had another sound (“kaka”) for expressing this idea.^[300] But “ot” was being extended in another way by a process of association. This was illustrated a month later, when the boy pointed to an engraving of Guido’s Aurora, and exclaimed, “Ot!” His dull parents could not at first comprehend this bold metaphoric use of language, until they bethought them that the clouds on which the aeronauts are sailing are a good deal like a volume of ascending steam.

421The sounds “kĕ,” “kă,” and “kăkă” were employed by C. from about the same age (seventeen and a half months) to express what is actually known or simply suspected to be disagreeable to taste or smell, such as a pipe held near him, a glass of beer, a vinegar bottle, and so forth. He had smelt the beer, and learnt its disagreeable odour, and in pronouncing the untried vinegar “kăkă” he was really carrying out a form of reasoning of a simple kind. This sound came to represent a much higher effort of abstraction some weeks later, when it was applied to things so unlike in themselves as milk spilt on the cloth, crumbs on the floor, soiled hands, etc. The idea here seized was plainly that of something soiled or dirty. But this half-æsthetic, half-ethical idea was reached largely by the help of others, more particularly perhaps his sister, who, as elder sisters are wont to do, supplemented the parental discipline by a vigorous inculcation of the well-recognised proprieties.

Another extension of the range of application of names used by others occurred about the same time (end of twentieth month). He employed the sound ‘ga’ (glass) so as to include a plated drinking cup, which of course others always called ‘cup’. This was curious as showing at this stage the superior interest of use (that of drinking utensil) to that of form and colour.

The generalisations just touched on have to do with those qualities and relations of things which strongly impress the baby mind, because they bear on the satisfaction of his wants and his feelings of pleasure and pain. In order to watch the calm movements of the intellect, when no longer urged by appetite and sense, we must turn to the child’s first detection of similarities in the objective attributes of things, as their shape, size, colour, and so forth. Here the first generalisations respecting the forms of bodies are a matter of peculiar interest to the scientific observer. The young thinker, with whom we are now specially concerned, achieved his first success in geometric abstraction, or the consideration of pure form, when just seventeen months old. He had learnt the name of his india-rubber ball. Having securely grasped this, he went on calling oranges “bŏ”. This left the father in some doubt whether 422the child was attending exclusively to form, as a geometrician should, for he was wont to make a toy of an orange, as when rolling it on the floor. This uncertainty was, however, soon removed. One day C. was sitting at table beside his sire, while the latter was pouring out a glass of beer. Instantly the ready namer of things pointed to the bubbles on the surface, and exclaimed, “Bŏ!” This was repeated on many subsequent occasions. As the child made no attempt to handle the bubbles, it was evident that he did not view them as possible playthings. As he got lost in contemplation, muttering, “Bŏ! bŏ!” his father tells us that he had the satisfaction of feeling sure that the young mind was already learning to turn away from the coarseness of matter, and fix itself on the refined attribute of form.

Although this was the most striking instance of pure or abstract consideration of form, attention to the shape of things was proved by many of the simple ideas reached at this stage. It is obvious, indeed, that a ready recognition of any member of a species of animals, as dog, in spite of considerable variations in size and colour, implies a power of singling out for special attention what we call relations of form. And this conclusion is borne out by the fact that by the end of the eighteenth month C. was quite an adept in recognising uncoloured drawings of animal and other familiar forms.

Colour is of course in itself of much more interest to a child than form, since it gives a keen sensuous enjoyment. Our diary furnishes a curious illustration of a propensity to classify things according to their colour. In his nineteenth month C. was observed to designate by the sound “appoo” (apple) a patch of reddish colour on the mantelpiece, which bore in its form no discoverable resemblance to an apple. At the same time, the effect of growing experience and of a deeper scrutiny of things in bringing out the superior significance of form is seen in the fact that this same word “appoo” came subsequently to be habitually applied to things of unlike colours, namely, apples, oranges, lemons, etc. It may be added that the history of this word “appoo” illustrates a process analogous to what Archbishop 423Trench (if I remember rightly) has called the degradation of words. When C. first used this name it designated objects simply as visible and tangible ones; he knew nothing of their taste. After he was permitted to try their flavours, the less worthy sensations now added naturally contributed a prominent ingredient to the meaning of the word. Thus, he began to use “appoo” for all edible fruits, including such shapeless masses as stewed apples.

It is not to be expected that children in their first attempts at scrutinising objects should be able to take in completely a complex form, as that of an animal, with all its parts and their relations one to another. C. gave ample proof of the fact that the first generalisations respecting form are apt to be rough and ready, grounded simply on a perception of one or two salient points. Thus, his first use of “bow-wow” showed that the name meant for him simply a four-legged creature. About the fifteenth month this word was thrown about in the most reckless way. Later on, when the canine form began to be disengaged in his mind from those of other quadrupeds, the pointed nose of the animal seems to have become a prominent feature in the meaning of the word. Thus, in his eighteenth month, C. took to applying the name ‘bow-wow’ to objects, such as fragments of bread or biscuit, as well as drawings, having something of a triangular form with a sharp angle at the apex. It is probable that if our little thinker had been able at this stage to define his terms, he would have said that a “bow-wow” was a four-legged thing with a pointed nose.

Here, however, it is only fair to C. to mention that his mind had at this time become prepossessed with the image of “bow-wow”. Not long before the date referred to he had been frightened by a small dog, which had crept unobserved into the room behind a lady visitor, lain quiet for some time under the table, and then, forgetting good manners, suddenly darted out and barked. There were many facts which supported the belief that the child’s mind was at this period haunted by images of dogs which approximated in their vividness to hallucinations; and this persistence of the canine image in 424the child’s brain naturally disposed him to see the “bow-bow” form in the most unpromising objects.

The use of the word “gee-gee,” which towards the end of the second year competed with “bow-wow” for the first place in C.’s vocabulary, illustrates the same fact. A horse was first of all distinguished from other quadrupeds by the length of his neck. Thus, when twenty months old, C. in a slovenly way, no doubt, applied the name “gee-gee” to the drawing of an ostrich, and also to a bronze figure representing a stork-like bird. This is particularly curious, as showing how a comparatively unimportant detail of form, as length of neck, overshadowed in his mind at this time what we should consider the much more important feature, the possession of four legs. The following are selected from among many other illustrations of the imperfect observation of complex forms. When twenty-one and a half months old he took to calling all triangular objects, including drawings, “ship”. The feature of the ship—as seen in real life and in his picture-books—which had fixed itself in his mind was the triangular sail.^[301] A similar propensity to select one characteristic feature was illustrated in another quaint observation of the diary. When twenty-three months old C.’s mother showed him a number of drawings of patterns of dresses, some surmounted by faces, some not. He pointed to one of the latter and said: “No nose!” From this, writes the father, lapsing again into his frivolous vein, it would seem that at this early age he had acquired a dim presentiment of the supreme dignity of the nasal organ among the features of the human countenance.

Progress in the accurate use of words was curiously illustrated in C.’s way of looking at and talking about his fellow-creatures. Oddly enough he began apparently by confusing his two parents, extending the name “ma” to his father till such time as he learnt “papa”. Then he proceeded after the manner of other children to embrace within the term “papa” all male adults, whether known to him or not. Thus he applied the name to photographs of 425distinguished savants, artists, and poets, which he found in his father’s album. When just eighteen months old he was observed to introduce the word ‘man’. For instance, he took to calling an etching of a recent British philosopher, and a terra-cotta cast of an ancient Roman one, “man,” as well as “papa”. Oddly enough, however, members of the other sex were still called exclusively by the name “mamma,” though the words “woman” and “lady” were certainly used at least as frequently as “man” in his hearing. This earlier discrimination of individual men than of individual women leads the father into some jocose observations about the more strongly marked individuality of men than of women, observations which would do very well in the mouth of a misogynist of the old school, but are altogether out of date in this advanced age.

By the twentieth month the extension of the name “papa” to other men was discontinued. His father tried him at this date with a photographic album. “Man” was now instantly applied to all male adults, except old ones with a grey beard. To these he invariably applied the name of an old gentleman, a friend of his. A woman was still called “mamma,” though the term “lady” (“’ady”) was clearly beginning to displace it; and no distinction was drawn between women of different ages. Finally, children were distinguished as boys or girls, apparently according as they were or were not dressed in petticoats.

The reservation of the names “papa” and “mamma” for his parents naturally gave pleasure to these worthy persons. It was something, they said, to feel sure at length that they were individualised in the consciousness of their much-cared-for offspring. This restricted use of the terms may be supposed to have involved a dim apprehension of a special relation of things to the child. “Papa” now carried with it the idea of the man who stands in a particular connexion with C. or “Ningi”; or, to express it otherwise, “man” began to signify those papas who have nothing specially to do with this important personage. This antecedent conjecture is borne out by the fact that the act of distinguishing between his father and other men followed rapidly, certainly within two or three weeks, the 426first use of his own name “Ningi”. In other words, as soon as his attention began to direct itself to himself, as the centre of his little world-circle, he naturally went on to distinguish between those persons and things that had some special connexion with this centre and those that had not.

The consciousness of self was noticed to grow much more distinct in the second half of this year. As might be expected the first idea of ‘self’ was largely a mental picture of the body. Thus the father tells us that when eighteen months old the child would instantly point to himself when he heard his name. If his father touched his face asking who that was, he replied, ‘Ningi’. Here the corporeal reference is manifest. When just over nineteen months, however, he showed that the idea was becoming fuller and richer with the germ of what we mean by the word personality. Thus when asked to give up something he liked, as the remnant of a biscuit, he would say emphatically, ‘No, no! Ningi!’ Similarly, when he saw his sister wipe her hands, he would say ‘Ningi!’ and proceed to imitate the action. By the end of the twenty-first month the child began to substitute ‘me’ for ‘Ningi’.

As we saw above, the child and the poet have this in common, that they view things directly as they are, free from the superficial and arbitrary associations, the conventional trappings, by the additions of which we prosaic people are wont to separate them into compartments with absolutely impenetrable walls. Hence the freshness, the charming originality of their utterances.

For example, C., when eighteen months old, was watching his sister as she dipped her crust into her tea. He was evidently surprised by the rare sight, and after looking a moment or two, exclaimed, “Ba!” (bath), laughing with delight, and trying, as was his wont when deeply interested in a spectacle, to push his mother’s face round so that she too might admire it. The boy delighted in such a figurative use of words, now employing them as genuine similes, as when he said of a dog panting after a run, “Dat bow-wow like puff-puff,” and of the first real ship which he saw sailing with a rocking movement, “Dat ship go marjory-daw” (i.e., like marjory-daw 427in the nursery rhyme). Like many a poet he had his recurring or standing metaphors. Thus, as we have seen, “ship” was the figurative expression for all objects having a pyramidal form. A pretty example of his love of metaphor was his habit of calling the needle in a small compass of his father’s “bir” (bird). It needs a baby mind to detect here the faint resemblance to the slight fragile form and the fluttering movement of a bird poised on its wings.

C. illustrates the anthropocentric impulse to look at natural objects as though they specially aimed at furthering or hindering our well-being. Thus he would show all the signs of kingly displeasure when his serenity of mind was disturbed by noises. When he was taken to the sea-side (about twenty-four months old) he greatly disappointed his parent, expectant of childish wonder in his eyes, by merely muttering, “Water make noise”.^[302] Again, he happened one day in the last week of this year to be in the garden with his father while it was thundering. On hearing the sound he said with an evident tone of annoyance, “Tonna mâ Ningi noi,” i.e., thunder makes noise for C., and he instantly added “Notty tonna!” (naughty thunder). Here, remarks the father, he was evidently falling into that habit of mind against which philosophers have often warned us, making man the measure of the universe.

The last quarter of this year was marked in C.’s case by a great enlargement of linguistic power. A marked advance was noticeable in the mastering of the mechanical difficulties of articulation. Thus he would surprise his father by suddenly bringing out new and difficult combinations of sound, as ‘flower,’ ‘water’ and ‘fetch’. Up to about the twenty-first month C.’s vocabulary had consisted almost entirely of what we should call substantives, such as, ‘papa,’ ‘man,’ which were used to express the arrival on the scene and the recognition of familiar objects. A few adjectives, as “ŏt” (hot), “co” (cold), “ni-ni” (nice), and “goo” (good), were frequently used, and were apparently beginning to have a proper attributive function assigned them. But these referred rather to the effect of 428things on the child’s feeling than to their inherent qualities. His father failed before this date to convey to him the meaning of “black” as applied to a dog. It is noteworthy that the child made considerable advance in the use of “me” and “my” before he was capable of qualifying objects by appending adjectives to them. The first use of an adjective for indicating some objective quality in a thing occurred at the end of the twenty-first month, when he exclaimed on seeing a rook fly over his head, “Big bir!”

At about the same date other classes of words came to be recognised and used as such, giving to the child’s language something of texture. Thus relations of place began to be set forth, as in using simple words like ‘up,’ ‘down,’ ‘on’. In some cases the designation of these relations was effected by original artifices which often puzzled the father. For instance the sound ‘da’ (or ‘dow’) was used from about the seventeenth month for the departure of a person, the falling of a toy on the ground, the completion of a meal. It seemed to be a general sign for ‘over’ or ‘gone’.^[303] It is doubtful whether this implied a clear consciousness of a relation of place. Sometimes the attempt to express such a relation in the absence of the needed words would lead to a picturesque kind of circumlocution. Thus when about twenty-one months old C. saw his father walking in the garden when he and his sister were seated at the luncheon table. He shouted out, ‘Papa ’at off!’ thus expressing the desirability of his father’s entering and taking part in the family meal.

Similar make-shifts would be resorted to in designating other and more subtle relations. Sometimes, indeed, the child would expect his hearers to supply the sign of relation, as when after having smelt the pepper box he put it away with an emphatic ‘Papa!’ which seemed to the somewhat biassed observer an admirably concise way of expressing the judgment that the pepper might suit his father, but it certainly did not suit him. A month later (æt. twenty-two months) he condescended to be more explicit. Having been told by his father that the cheese 429was bad for Ningi, he indulged a growing taste for antithesis by adding, ‘Good, papa!’

His ideas of time-relations were at this date of the haziest. He seems to have got a dim inkling of the meaning of ‘by-and-by’. His father had managed to stop his crying for a thing by promising it ‘by-and-by’. After this when crying he would suddenly pull up, and with a heroic effort to catch his breath would exclaim, ‘By-’n’-by!’ “What (asks the father) was the equivalent of this new symbol in the child’s consciousness? Was he already beginning to seize the big boundless future set over against the fleeting point of the present moment and holding in its ample bosom consolatory promises for myriads of these unhappy presents?” and so forth; but here he seems to grow even less severely scientific than usual. It may be added that about the same time (twenty-one months) the child began to use the word ‘now’. Thus after drinking his milk he would point to a little remainder at the bottom of his cup and say, ‘Milk dare now,’ that is presumably ‘there is still milk there’.

His ideas of number at this time were equally rudimentary. Oddly enough it was just as he was attaining to plurality of years that he began to distinguish with the old Greeks the one from the many. One was correctly called ‘one’. Any number larger than one, on the other hand, was sometimes styled ‘two,’^[304] sometimes ‘three,’ and sometimes ‘two, three, four’. He had been taught to say ‘one, two, three, four,’ by his mother, but the first lesson in counting had clearly failed to convey more than the difference between unity and multitude. The series of verbal sounds, ‘two, three, four,’ probably helped him to realise the idea of number, and in any case it was a forcible way of expressing it.

As suggested above, primitive substantive-forms probably do duty as verbs in the language of the child as in that of primitive man. True verbs as differentiated signs of action came into use at the date we are speaking of, and these began to give to the boy’s embryonic speech something of the structure, the sentence.

As one might naturally conjecture from the disproportionate amount of attention manifestly bestowed on this child, he had 430all the masterfulness of his kind, and the first form of the verb to be used was the imperative. Thus by the end of the twentieth month he had quite a little vocabulary for giving effect to his sovereign volitions, such as, ‘On!’ (get on), ‘Ook!’ (look). It was in the use of commands that he showed some of his finest inventiveness. Thus when just seventeen months old he wanted his mother to get up. He began by lifting his hands and saying, ‘Ta, ta!’ (sign of going out). Finding this to be ineffective, he tried, with a comical simulation of muscular strength, to pull or push her up, at the same time exclaiming, “Up!” The lifting of the hands looked like a bit of picturesque gesture-language. In his twenty-first month he acquired a new and telling word of command, viz., ‘Way’ (i.e., out of my way), as well as the invaluable sign of prohibition, ‘Dō’ (i.e., don’t), both of which, it need hardly be said, he began to bandy about pretty freely, especially in his dealings with his sister.

A landmark in C.’s intellectual development is set by the father at the age of nineteen and a half months. Before this date he had only made rather a lame attempt at sentence-building by setting his primitive names in juxtaposition, e.g., ‘Tit, mamma, poo,’ which being interpreted means, ‘Sister and mamma, have pudding’. But now he took a very decided step in advance, and by a proper use of a verb as such constructed what a logician calls a proposition with its subject and predicate. He happened to observe his sister venting some trouble in the usual girlish fashion, and exclaimed, ‘Tit ki’ (sister is crying), following up the assertion by going towards her and trying to stop her. Another example of a sentence rather more complex in structure which occurred a fortnight later had also to do with his sister. He saw her lying on her back on the grass, and exclaimed with all the signs of joyous wonder, ‘Tit dow ga!’ (i.e., sister is down on the grass). Evidently the unpredictable behaviour of this member of his family deeply impressed the young observer. It is noticeable that these first exceptional efforts in assertion were prompted by feeling.^[305]

431These first tentatives in verbal assertion, we are told, sounded very odd owing to the slowness of the delivery and the stress impartially laid on each word. C. had as yet no inkling of the subtleties of rhetoric, and was too much taken up with the weighty business of expressing thought somehow to trouble about such niceties as relative emphasis, and variation of pitch and pace.

As a rule, remarks the father, it was surprising how suddenly, as it seemed, the boy hit on the right succession of verbal sounds. Only very rarely would he stumble, as when after having seen a fly taken out of his milk, and on being subsequently asked whether he would not be glad to see his sister on her return from a visit, he said, ‘(Y)es, tell Ningi ’bout fy’ (Yes, Ningi will tell her about the fly).^[306]

The impulse to express himself, to communicate his experiences and observations to others, seemed to be all-possessing just now, and odd enough it was to note the make-shifts to which he was now and again driven. One day, when just twenty and a half months old, he sat in a chair with a heavyish book which he found it hard to hold up. He turned to his mother and said solemnly, “Boo go dow” (the book is going down or falling). Then, as if remarking a look of unintelligence in his audience, he threw it down and exclaimed, “Dat!” by which vigorous proceeding he gave a vivid illustration of his meaning.

It was noticeable that he would at this time play at sentence-making in a varied imitation of others’ assertions, thereby hitting out some quaint fancy which appeared to amuse him. Thus when told that there is a man on the horse he would say, ‘Ningi on horse,’ ‘Tit on horse,’ and so forth. Such playful practice in utterance probably furthers the growth of readiness and precision in the use of sentences.

The point in the intellectual growth of a child at which he acquires such a mastery of language as to carry on a sustained conversation is a proud and happy one for the fond parent. In the case of C. this date, twenty-three months and ten days, is, of course, marked with red letters. He made a great noise 432running about and shouting in his bedroom. His mother came in and rebuked him in the usual form (‘Naughty! naughty!’). He thereupon replied, “Tit mak noi” (Sister makes the noise). Mother (seriously): “Sister is at school”. C., with a still bolder look: “Mamma make noi”. Mother (with convulsive effort to suppress laughing, still more emphatically): “No, mamma was in the other room”. C. (looking archly at his doll, known as May): “May make noi”. This sally was followed by a good peal of boyish laughter.

The father evidently feels that this incident is highly suggestive of a lack of moral sense. So he thinks it well to add to the observation that the child had all the normal moral sensibility. But of this more presently.

We may now pass to the comparatively few observations (other than those already dealt with under verbal utterance) which refer to the child’s feelings. As already remarked, he was, like most other children, peevish and cross in the first year, and I regret to say that the diary refers more than once to violent outbursts of infantile rage in the second year also. Here is one sample entry (æt. nineteen months): Feelings of greediness, covetousness and spite begin to manifest themselves with alarming distinctness. When asked to give up a bit of pudding he says, “No,” in a coy, shy sort of manner, turning away. When further pressed he grows angry. On the other hand, he clamours for his sister’s dolls, and bears refusal with very ill grace. When, given up as hopelessly naughty, he is handed over to the nurse, and carried out of the room by this long-suffering person, he ferociously slaps her on the face. This slap appears not to be a pure invention, his sister having been driven more than once to visit him with this chastisement. He will also go up and slap his sister when she cries. He probably puts the nurse who carries him out and the sister who cries in the same category of naughty people. Sometimes he seems quite overpowered by vexation of spirit, and will lie down on the floor on his face and have a good, long, satisfying cry.

The child’s timidity has already been touched on. At the age of sixteen months, we are told, the sight of the drawing of 433a lion accompanied by roaring noises imitated by the father would greatly terrify him, driving him to his mother, in whose bosom he would hide his face, drawing down his under lip in an ominous way. Two months later the diary tells us that the child has had a fright. One day a lady called with a dog, which secreted itself under the table, and later on suddenly rushed out and made for Master C. The shock was such that since that time whenever he hears a strange noise he runs to his mother, exclaiming, ‘Bow-wow!’ in a terrified manner.

Before the close of the year, however, he began to show a manlier temper. The sight of a dog still made him run towards his mother and cling to her, but as soon as the animal moved off he would look up into her face laughingly and repeat the consolatory saying which she herself had taught him: “Ni (nice) bow-wow! bow-wow like Ningi”. In this humble fashion did he make beginning at the big task of manning himself to face the terrors of things.

As pointed out above, he extended his dislike to sudden and loud noises to inanimate objects. Thus in the last week of the year he was evidently put out, if not actually frightened, by hearing distant thunder; and about the same date, as we have seen, he showed a similar dislike to the sea when first taken near it. He would not approach it for some days, and he cried when he saw his father swimming in it.

It is sad in going through the pages of the diary to note that there is scarcely any observation during this second year on the development of kindly feelings. One would have supposed that with all the affection and care lavished on him C. might have manifested a little tenderness in response. The only incident put down under the head of social feeling in this year is the following (æt. twenty months): “When he eats porridge in the morning at the family breakfast he takes a look round and says: ‘Mamma, Tit, papa, Ningi,’ appearing to be pleased at finding himself sharing in a common enjoyment. This (continues the narrator) is a step onward from the anti-social attitude which he took up not long since when some of his mother’s egg was given to his sister and he shouted prohibitively: ‘No! no!’”

434The worthy parent appears to be making the most of very small mercies here. Yet in justice to this child it must be said that he seems to have shown even at this tender age the rudiment of a conscience. The father is satisfied, indeed, that he displayed an instinctive respect for command or law. “Thus,” he says, “when sixteen months old the child hung down his head or hid it in his mother’s breast when for the first time I scolded him.” He goes on to say that after having been forbidden to do a thing, as to touch the coal scuttle or to take up his food with his fingers, he will stop just as he is going to do it, and take on a curious look of timidity or shamefacedness.

He seemed, too, before the end of the second year, to be getting to understand something of the meaning of that recurrent nursery-word ‘naughty,’ and the less frequent ‘good’. When seventeen months old his father tried him, on what looked like the approach of an outburst of temper, with a ‘Cliffy, be good!’ uttered in a firm peremptory manner. The child’s noise was at once arrested, and on the father’s asking: ‘Is Cliffy good?’ he answered, ‘Ea,’ his sign for ‘yes’. A little later he showed that he strongly disliked being called naughty,—vigorously remonstrating when so described with an emphatic, ‘No, no! good!’ He seems to have followed the usual childish order in beginning to apply “naughty” to others, his sister more particularly, much sooner than “good”. It was not till the middle of the twenty-first month that he recognised moral desert in this long-suffering sister. After a little upset of temper on her part, when the crying was over, he remarked in a quiet approving tone, ‘Goo!’ and on being asked by his mother who was good he answered, ‘Tit’.

As our example of his dawning powers of conversation may suggest, C. early developed the childish sense of fun. Most if not all children love pretence or make-believe. Here is an example of this childish tendency. When about eighteen months old during a short visit to his father’s room C. happened to be walking in the direction of the door. His father at once said, ‘Ta ta,’ just as if the child were really going away. C. instantly entered into the joke, repeating the 435‘ta ta,’ moving towards the door, then returning, and so renewing the pretty little fraud.

Sometimes, as parents know, this impish love of make-believe comes very inconveniently into conflict with discipline and authority. One day, about the same date, he got hold of a photograph portrait of an uncle of his. His mother bade him give it up to her. He walked towards her looking serious enough, nearly put it into her hand, and then suddenly drew his hands back laughing.

In other examples of laughter given in this chapter we see something very like contempt. When two years and eight months old he was observed to laugh out loudly on surveying his small india-rubber horse, the head of which had somehow got twisted back and caught between the hind legs and the tail. He then waxed tender and said pityingly, “Poor gee-gee!” “Here,” writes the father in his most ponderous manner, “we see an excellent example of the capricious and variable attitude of the childish mind towards its toys, an attitude closely paralleled by that of the savage towards his fetich.”

The two or three notes on the development of the active powers have to do with the application of intelligence to manual and other performances. Here is one. At the age of seventeen months he was sitting at table with the family when he found himself in want of some bread and butter. He tried his customary petition, ‘Bup,’ but to no purpose. He then stretched out his hand towards the bread knife, repeating the request. A day or two after this the father put his inventive powers to a severer proof. He placed the knife out of his reach. When the desire for more recurred he grew very impatient, looking towards his father and saying ‘Bup’ with much vehemence of manner. At length, getting more excited, he bethought him of a new expedient and pointed authoritatively to his empty plate.

Some of these practical tentatives were rather amusing. One day, just a month after the date of the last incident, he had two keys, one in each hand. With one of these he proceeded to try the keyhole of the door, oddly enough, however, holding it by the wrong end and inserting the handle. Now 436came the difficulty of turning it. Two hands at the very least were needed, but unhappily the other hand was engaged with the second key, which was not to be relinquished for an instant. So the little fellow, with the inventive resource of a monkey (the father naturally says of an ‘engineer’), proceeded to use his teeth as pincers, clutching the obstinate key between these and trying to turn it with the head. At this date he had acquired considerable skill in the manipulation of door handles and keys. A certain cupboard was a peculiarly fascinating mystery, appealing at once to the desires of the flesh and to a disinterested curiosity, and he was soon master of the ‘open sesame’ to its spacious and obscure recesses.

By far the most respectable exhibition of will about this time was in the way of self-restraint. I have already remarked how he would try to pull himself together when prostrated by fear of the dog. A similarly quaint attempt at self-mastery would occur during his outbreaks of temper. The father says he had got into the way, when the child was inclined to be impatient and teasing, of putting up his finger, lowering his brow, and saying with emphasis: ‘Cliffy, be good!’ After this when inclined to be naughty he would suddenly and quite spontaneously pull himself up, hold up his finger and lower his brow as if reprimanding himself. “The observation is curious,” writes the father, in his graver manner, “as suggesting that self-restraint may begin by an imitation of the action of extraneous authority.”^[307]

Third Year.

One cannot help regretting on entering upon the third chapter of C.’s biography that the father gives us no account of his physical development. This is a desideratum not only from a scientific but from a literary point of view. Biographers rightly describe the look of their hero, and, if possible, they aid the imagination of their reader by a portrait. The reader of this child’s history has nothing, not even a bare reference to height, by which he can form an image of the concrete personality 437whose sayings and doings are here recorded; and these sayings and doings begin now to grow really interesting.

There is very little in the notes of this year respecting the growth of observation. When the child was two years five months old the father appears to have made a rather lame attempt to determine the order in which he learnt the colours. He says that he placed the several colours before him and taught him the names, and found as a result that the order of acquisition was the following: red, blue, yellow, and green. It is added that blue was distinguished some time before green. His observations, taken along with those of Preyer and others, are interesting as seeming to suggest that the order in which the colours are learnt differs considerably in the case of individual children.^[308] In the eighth month of this year we find a note to the effect that the boy discriminates and recognises colour well. This is illustrated by the fact that he at once calls grey with a slightly greenish tinge ‘green’. The connexion between the possession of suitable vocables and explicit discrimination is seen in the fact that whereas he applies the name blue not only to the several varieties of that colour but also to violet, he uses “red” as the name for certain reds only, excepting pink, which is called “pink,” and deep purple red, which is called “brown”.

The third year is epoch-making in the history of memory. It is now that impressions begin to work themselves into the young consciousness so deeply and firmly that they become a part of the permanent stock-in-trade of the mind. The earliest recollections of most of us do not reach back beyond this date, if indeed so far. In C.’s case the father was able to observe this fixing and consolidating of impressions. For instance, when two years and two months old he had been staying for a month or so at a farmhouse in a little sea-side village, D——, where there was a sheep dog yclept Bob. Some three and a half months later he happened, during one of his walks in his London suburb, to see a sheep dog, whereupon he remarked, ‘Dat old Bob, I dink’. A week or two after this, on seeing the picture of a wind-mill, he remarked, "Dat like down at 438D——". Later on, six months after this visit, on being asked what honey was, he remarked that he had had some at D——. Nine months after this visit his father was talking to him about the game of cricket. He then said, "Oh, yes (his favourite expression just now when he understands), I ’member, Jingo ran after ball down at D——". As a matter of fact his father and friends used to play tennis at D——, and Jingo, the sheep dog, did pretend to ‘field’ the balls, often in a highly inconvenient fashion.

It is evident from these quotations that the experiences at D——, just at the beginning of the third year, had woven themselves into the tissue of his permanent memory. The father remarks in a footnote that C. retains a certain recollection of D—— at present, that is to say, in his fourteenth year.

These lively recallings show a growth of imaginative power, and this was seen in other ways too. Thus it is remarked by the father in the fourth month of the year that he was getting much comfort from anticipation. If there are apples or other things on the table which he likes but must not have, he will philosophically remark, “Ningi have apples by-and-by when he big boy”. He says this with much emphasis, rising at the end to a shouting tone, and half breaking out into jubilant laughter.

The childish power of vivid imaginative realisation was abundantly illustrated in his play. Here is a sample (end of fourth month). His sister went to the end of the room and said (with a reference to their recent visit to the sea-side): ‘I’m going far away on the beach’. He then began to whisper something, and went under the table and said distinctly: ‘Ningi go away from Tit, far away on beach’. He repeated this with tremulous voice, and at length burst out crying. He wept also when his sister pretended to do the same, so that these little tragic representations had to be stopped as dangerously exciting.

It has often been said that ‘fibbing’ in young children is the outcome of a vivid imagination. C. illustrated this. As the example given under the second year shows, his daring in inventing untruth and passing it off as truth was pure play, and frankly shown to be so by the accompaniment of a hearty 439laugh. This tendency to invent continued to assert itself. Thus when (in the eighth month) he is asked a question, as, “Who told you so?” and has no suitable answer ready he will say, ‘Dolly,’ showing his sense of the fun of the thing by a merry laugh. The father remarks that it is a little difficult to bring heavy moral artillery to bear on this playful fibbing which is evidently intended much more to astonish than to deceive.^[309]

We may now see what progress C. was making in thinking power during this year. It is during the third year that children may be expected to get a much better hold on the slippery forms of language, and at the same time to show in connexion with a freer and more extensive use of language a finer and deeper insight into the manifold relations of things.

In C.’s case, to judge by the journal, the progress of speech advanced at a normal pace, neither hurrying nor yet greatly loitering. Articulation, the father remarks early in the year, has got much more precise, only a few sounds seeming to occasion difficulty, as for example the initial s, which he transforms into an aspirate, saying, for example, ‘huga’ for sugar.

A noticeable linguistic advance is registered in the fourth month of the year, viz., a kind of sudden and energetic raid on the names of objects and persons. “He is always asking the names of things now (writes our chronicler). Thus, after calling a common object, as a brush, by its name he will ask me, ‘What is the name of this?’ Perhaps he thinks that everything has its own exclusive or ‘proper’ name as he has. He is beginning to note, too, that some things have more than one proper name, that his mother, for example, though called ‘ma’ by himself, is addressed by her Christian name by me, and so forth. When asked, ‘What is Ningi’s name?’ he now answers, ‘Kifford’.”

What is far more significant, he now (æt. two years three months) began to use ‘you’ in addressing his father or mother, also ‘me’ and ‘I’. But these changes are so momentous and epoch-making in the history of the young intelligence that they will have to be specially considered later on.

440Like other children he showed a fine contempt for the grammatical distinctions of pronominal forms. Thus ‘me’ was used for ‘mine,’ ‘her’ for ‘she,’ ‘she’s’ for ‘hers,’ ‘him’ for ‘he’ and for ‘his,’ ‘us’ for ‘our,’ and so forth.^[310] It is pretty clear that none of these solecisms was due to an imitation of others’ incorrect speech, and they appear to show the action of the principle of biological economy, a few word-sounds being made to do duty for a number of relations (e.g., in the use of ‘me’ for ‘my’), and familiar word-sounds being modified according to analogy of other modifications where older people use a quite new form (‘she’s’ for ‘hers’). A similar disposition to simplify and rationalise the tongue of his ancestors showed itself in the use of verbs. Thus, if his mother said, ‘Cliffy, you are not good,’ he would reply in a perfectly rational manner, “Yes, I are”. “It was odd,” writes the father, “to hear him bring out in solemn judge-like tones such terrible solecisms as ‘Him haven’t,’ yet there was a certain logical method in his lawlessness.” Another simplification on which he hit in common with other children was the use of ‘did’ as a sign of past tense, thus saving himself all the trouble of understanding the irregular behaviour of our verbs.^[311]

One or two quaint applications of words are noted. Thus towards the end of the third month of this year he took to using ‘cover’ in a somewhat puzzling fashion. Thus he once pointed to the back of his hand and remarked, ‘No milk on this cover’. The father suspects that the term connoted for his consciousness an outside part or the outer surface of an object.

A very noticeable improvement took place in the forming 441of sentences. All sorts of questions (writes the chronicler) are now put correctly and neatly, as, ‘Where are you going to?’ ‘Where did that come from?’ He is now striking out most ambitiously in new and difficult directions, not fighting shy even of such school-horrors as conditional clauses (as they used to be called, at least). Very funny it must have been to watch these efforts, and the ingenuities of construction to which the little learner found himself driven. For example, he happened one morning (end of fourth month) when in his father’s bedroom to hear a knocking in the adjoining room. He walked about the room remarking to himself, ‘I can’t make out somebody,’ which seemed his own original fashion of avoiding the awkwardness of our elaborate form, “I can’t make out who the person is (that is knocking)”. A still quainter illustration of the skill with which he found his way out of linguistic difficulties is the following. His sister once said to him (first week of fifth month), ‘You had better not do that,’ whereupon he replied, “I think me better will”. Here is a sample of his mode of dealing with conditionals (end of sixteenth month), “If him (a tree) would be small, I would climb up”.

His highly individualised language, remarks the father, was rendered more picturesque by the recurrence of certain odd expressions which he picked up and applied in his own royal fashion. One of these was, “Well, it might be different,” which he often used when corrected for a fault, and on other occasions as a sort of formula of protestation against what he thought to be an exaggerated statement.

We may now notice some new manifestations of thinking power. All thought, we are told, proceeds by the finding out of similarities and dissimilarities. C. continued to note the resemblances of things. Thus one day (end of second month) he noticed the dog Jingo breathing quickly after a smart run and observed, ‘Like puff-puff’. But what was much more noticeable this year was the boy’s impulse to draw distinctions and contrasts. It may certainly be said in his case that likeness was distinctly apprehended before difference, that in the development of his rhetoric the antithesis followed the simile. One of the first contrasts to impressimpress the tender consciousness 442of children is that of size. This comes out among other ways in their habit of setting their own puny persons in antithesis to big grown-up folk, a habit sufficiently attested by the recurring expressions, “When I am big,” “When I am a man”. C., like other children, took to denoting a contrast of size by a figurative extension of the relation, mamma—baby. Thus it was noted (end of seventh month) that he would call a big tree “mamma tree,” and a shrub “baby tree”. One day he pointed to the clock on the mantel-piece and talked of the ‘big mamma clock’. He had, it seems, just before been playing with his father’s watch, which he also called clock.^[312]